The Shadow Obstacle Course

What an excellent concept by Joe Matulis.

Blooms Revised Taxonomy and apps

What a great resource. Handheld Learning in Physical Education has a post talking about Blooms and apps. What apps apply to which components of Blooms. The post links to the Edutopia site which has articles in a series looking at apps that fit each of the six areas of Blooms.

Time Motion app for Ipad2

Today in my 8/9 PE class I used the Time Motion app to collect data on student movement during their volleyball games. The time motion app allows you to record (for a single student) the % of time spent standing, walking, jogging, fast running and sprinting. Normally you get the data and then email it but as there is no WiFi in our gym I copied the data from the Ipad2 against the students name on a piece of paper which was fairly painless. Each student that I observed was watched for 2 minutes. It then took ten minutes to enter that data on a spreadsheet and produce a graph that showed my classes movement intensities. Today was just an experiment but in the future this data will be excellent for students to analyse and make links between those who are successfull in games/sports and the amount of effort (movement) they put in while older students can look at which energy systems are dominant during a particular sport based on movement intensity. Such a simple app providing powerful data!

Putting students images on a class blog

I've created a class blog for two of my PE classes in 2012 (reception class and 1/2 class). The purpose of this blog is to provide a window on the classroom for parents. It will be private and show images and video of students as they participate in my PE class through the year. It will include my program and curriculum outcomes (SACSA Framework). I am still yet to run it past parents at a meeting at the start of next year and hope that no one has reservations about their child being put on a private blog and probably on YouTube, also private. I see it as an excellent way to connect parents with their child's classroom and what happens at school.

What I'd like to know from others who have created class blogs is how you go about having a class blog that is not private yet still put student images on it. How do you convince/get this past parents and the school? I view class blogs that are open to anyone on the net and wonder what type of processes the teacher and school has used to allow this to occur. I ask this question because in the future I'd like to have blogs that are not private and that enable collaboration for example with another class somewhere in the world. I would love to hear others opinions and thoughts.

Always Learning

There is a great analogy used by my Deputy Principal who borrowed it from a Principal that was at our school for a short time. "You would not want a surgeon operating on you who never updated his/her training, learnt new methods or consulted with colleagues and so it goes that you would not want a teacher who never engaged in these things educating your child".